Acknowledged by scholars from a variety of fields as a transformative period, the ‘long’ eighteenth century (1660-1800) and its drama embodied notions of gender, class, sexuality, and political identity. We will read a variety of dramatic genres – sentimental comedy, heroic romance, personal tragedy, social comedy, political tragedy, and she-tragedy. Through these diverse genres, we will consider such dramatic figures as the libertine, the fop, the tragic hero, the man of feeling, the amorous widow, the witty heroine, the cross-dressed woman, the fallen woman, the romantic friend, and the virginal victim. We will examine how changes in the political, economic, and social landscape of eighteenth-century England helped determine the evolution of these various representations of gender and sexual identity, and influenced the changing genre conventions on the period’s stage.